A Quantitative Study of Nocodazole’S Effect on HeLa Cells’ Growth Rate and F-actin Structure

Abstract

HeLa cells were derived from human cervical cancer, which has been widely used as research model to study mammalian cell functions. In this work, nocodazole, a microtubule destabilizer, was used to treat HeLa cells with different concentrations. The results showed that nocodazole was able to inhibit HeLa cell’s growth rate significantly at the concentration of 100 nM. It suggested that nocodazole may inhibit cell growth through an alternative impacting effect other than destabilizing microtubules, since the effect of nocodazole destabilizing microtubule is usually not seen at micromolar range. However, at nanomolar concentration, nocodazole was not able to induce any changes in F-actin structure. Whereas, at concentration of 1 mM, nocodazole induced significant alterations of F-actin structure in HeLa cells. It indicated the strong relationship between microtubule and actin dynamics. Our work suggested that a molecule may exhibit different impacting mechanisms at different concentrations. Since nocodazole has been used as a chemotherapy reagent in cancer treatment, it will be beneficial to re-evaluate the effective concentration in terms of cancer treatment.